For Spring semester 2009-2010, the Behavioral, Computational, and Systems Neuroscience (BCS) Journal Club will meet on Tuesdays from 12:00 to 1:15 pm in Uris Hall 205.
The overarching theme this semester is Oscillations. Adhering to this theme is not required, but recommended. Please interpret it broadly. Theories of gamma, beta, and theta oscillations in the nervous system are the centroid of intent, but alpha, sleep, circadian, etc. rhythms are also spot-on as are reasonably accessible dynamical systems topics from math and engineering.
To add yourself to the BCS-L mailing list, send a plain-text email to bcs-L-request@cornell.edu with the body of the message saying simply join. The subject line doesn't matter. Sending the message leave instead will unsubscribe you from the list. See Cornell's Lyris HowTo page for further details.
Please contact Thomas Cleland with any questions (David Smith is on walkabout this semester). BCS meeting archive.
In discussion, Patrick brought up Li et al (2004), a paper from Mu-ming Poo's lab showing that those presynaptic neurons that spike early, and that consequently (via STDP) have their synaptic weights upon a postsynaptic neuron strengthened, are also themselves rendered more excitable. That is, by this mechanism STDP can "work on the presynaptic neuron" as well as on its output synapse. The net effect of this can be to durably group a set of early-firing neurons together into a fully synchronous ensemble evoking activity in that postsynaptic cell.